TWELVE

ON THE DAY the end began, Anne suspected nothing.

Her lessons began as usual: she was closeted with her tutor, Lady Margaret Motesfont, a thin-faced woman with narrow brown teeth, whose satisfaction in following the progress of a fine piece of rhetoric was seldom matched by satisfaction in her pupil’s work. But Erzebet was due to make an inspection later that morning, so Anne applied herself, one ear cocked for the church bells as they tolled the passing hours, and one eye on the vellum, her pen scratching, struggling to trace answers to Lady Margaret’s difficult questions. The subject that day was an argument from Louis, King of France, a piece weighing the merit of the landsmen’s souls against the deepsmen’s, the question of what form of man most represented God’s image corporeally and spiritually. It was as well-argued as most such tracts, which was to say, its arguments were familiar, though Anne found it a little flat in expression and lacking in passion for the goodness of God; though she did not say so, she suspected that it might receive a little less attention were it not by a royal author. Then again, the language of the deep, Louis’s mother tongue, was hardly fit for poetic flourishes. The Bible spoke of the God that divided the waters and placed the firmament between them, but it was impossible to express the word “firmament” in the deepsmen’s language: it stopped at surface, the place where the water met the air, and anything beyond that could only be conveyed by the word up. As Anne persisted with Louis’s arguments, laid out in his stark French, tracing the inevitable conclusion that the person of the king mingled elements in the most perfect combination under Heaven—a conclusion she had little personal reason to quarrel with, but seldom applied to herself, being more interested in the notion of God as light than God as king—at the back of her mind was Erzebet, her forceful, blunt sentences in the deepsmen’s tongue and her sharp, laconic, careful English. The argument itself was not one that Erzebet had ever much bothered with; she merely sat on her throne while rhetoricians repeated it, still as a stone-faced Virgin.

Eleven o’clock tolled, and Anne looked up in hope. Erzebet was a punctual woman, and finally she was due.

The door remained closed, and Lady Margaret tapped the table, summoning Anne’s attention. “Continue, if you please.”

“My royal mother will be here shortly,” Anne said. “We should stay for her.”

“We will continue with the lesson, my lady Princess.” Margaret’s face was stern, and Anne felt herself disliked. The pedantry of her tutor, Margaret’s love for books of argument and impatience with Anne’s adolescent understanding, made Anne the more eager for her mother’s appearance. Conscious, though, that Erzebet had little sympathy with Anne on days when she had scanted her education, Anne bent her head again to her book, feeling an antipathy to King Louis that had nothing to do with the fact that he was French, and a rival king at that.

Quarter past eleven rang from the steeple.

“My royal mother is late,” Anne said. “The clock has struck the quarter hour.”

“I heard nothing,” Lady Margaret replied.

“Perhaps not, it is far away,” Anne explained, trying to excuse Margaret’s landsman ears. “But it has sounded.”

“We will continue, my lady Princess.” Again, the tone was firm, but there was a little rattle in Margaret’s throat, a trace of hoarseness, that made Anne look up sharply.

“Do you not wonder where my royal mother is?” she said. At the back of her neck, a tendril of anxiety began to coil.

“My lady Princess, please continue with your reading.” Anne’s eyes were focused on Lady Margaret’s mouth as she spoke, the sight of it filling her vision as Anne’s hands grew cold and unsteady. Somehow it was hard to look away from it, ivory-dark teeth, straight on the top row but crooked on the bottom as if badly shuffled; a flake of loose skin peeling from lips suddenly gone white.

“Where is my mother?” Anne’s voice came out in a gasp. She inhaled and inhaled, her ribs swelling and clamping inside her dress, but there wasn’t enough air in the room.

The sound of Lady Margaret’s swallow was loud as the click of a gate-latch. “My lady Princess, we must stay until we are sent for.”

“I want to see my mother.” All Anne could think of was the bruises she had seen, indigo clouds stamped on white skin, Erzebet’s stillness, her rigid refusal to flinch as Philip shook thick fists before his courtiers.

“We must stay until we are sent for.” Margaret’s voice was pinched, but her eyes were black and her skin clean of colour. The folds of her skirt did not hide the hands that she gripped together in her lap.

“Has my lord my uncle—where is my uncle Philip?” Anne said. The need for an answer was so intense that her teeth chattered as she spoke.

Lady Margaret shook her head, taking a grasp on the fine leather binding of the book she had held all morning. “His Majesty has kept to his chamber all morning, my lady Princess.”

Anne shook her head, terrified. Always, she had avoided Philip for his clumsy gestures and loud cries. She would have owned to being frightened of him, somewhat, but not until this morning, with fear pounding suddenly in her chest, did she understand how frightened she must always have been. Philip never kept to his chamber. He was carried from place to place without consultation of his wishes, and while he might be taken for an airing when there was an ambassador in court he might offend, he was never shut up. What had he done to her mother?

“Take me to her.”

Lady Margaret shook her head, fast as a shivering dog. “We must stay till—”

I want my mother. Anne blasted out the sentence in the deepsmen’s tongue at the top of her voice, a voice made to carry across the Atlantic tides. Her own ears buzzed, and Lady Margaret flinched, gathering the book to her chest like a blanket.

I want my mother. I want my mother. I want my mother.

Lady Margaret turned her head aside, but Anne’s lungs were royal, and could carry on a chant for hours.

“My lady Princess …” Margaret shouted over the din.

“I want to see my mother.” Anne switched to English, repeating the phrase in an endless stream. Her voice rose and rose. Fear was surging through her, a riptide in her chest, and the angry satisfaction of seeing her tutor grow exhausted under the barrage of sound was a salve, a shallow hope that she might, for a moment, mistake her terror for fury.

When Lady Margaret burst into tears, Anne’s voice faltered for a moment. Margaret was a strict woman, dry, fonder of the treatises she taught than of the act of teaching them, and Anne had thought her capable of no emotion beyond scholarly appreciation and impatience with fuzzy thinking. To see her weep was to see the world upended.

Anne swallowed, too frightened by Margaret’s display to feel pity. “I want to see my mother,” she said. “Take me to my mother.”

At Anne’s drop in volume, Lady Margaret looked up. “I shall say I acted on your orders,” she said, as if to herself, still crying quietly, her hands forming fists over the leather bound volume cradled in her lap. “I shall return to the country. You wish to see your mother, my lady Princess? Come with me.”

Both girl and woman were gasping with tears as Margaret seized Anne by the arm and dragged her from the room. Anne made a grab for her sticks, but Margaret was walking at full pace, speeding up to a run as if pursued, and Anne’s legs slipped and scurried as she tried to follow, kept upright only by the clutch on her arm. As the girl stumbled, Lady Margaret did not slow her pace, but instead took hold of her with both hands, gripping Anne with a painful force, like a woman clutching at bedclothes in a nightmare. Anne, dazed with fear, gripped back.

Margaret raced and Anne staggered across the palace until they reached a hall where soldiers stood guard. Standing amongst them was Robert Claybrook, delaying an anxious-looking Francis Shingleton, who was attempting to hurry in through a doorway. Behind the open door, Anne heard the sound that had been building in her ears since she and Margaret had begun their frantic journey. Someone was screaming.

Claybrook looked up as they skidded to a halt. “Lady Margaret, what do you mean by this? You cannot bring her here.”

“My lord, she commanded me to bring her, she was not to be dissuaded.” Lady Margaret, tall as she towered over Anne, looked thin and small against Claybrook’s soldierly height; the hand on Anne’s arm gripped tighter.

“This is no sight for her.” Claybrook took hold of Margaret’s shoulder, pushing her backwards. “Take her away at once. This is no place for the princess to be.”

The motion of Claybrook’s arm loosened Margaret’s grip for just a second, and Anne made a desperate lunge and broke free. Her legs scrabbled on the floor, and, reeling, she fell to her knees, scrambled forward and collapsed inside the room.

Someone lay on the bed. Dark wings rose around her, bedsheets soaking in blood. The woman thrashed and shrieked, raking the air. The room was full of people, Shingleton hovering anxiously, but none dared go near the flailing claws, the curses that tore out of a throat half-clotted with gore. With every jerk and turn of her body, the woman scraped off more skin, rags of flesh sticking to the blankets in clumps. What lay on the bed was a wet, red-yellow hulk, no face remaining, no features but a screaming voice. The smell of her wounds was like nothing Anne had ever encountered, like nothing on earth. In a corner, a priest was swinging a censer; outside, a bonfire had been lit; herbs were strewn in bundles on the floor, but the smell of scored flesh choked everything. The room was veined with drifts of smoke, and Erzebet ripped at the stained sheets, entangled in a web of blood and skin before Anne’s stinging eyes, as if Hell had reached up and grasped her mother in a wet, enclosing hand.